Talk:Saurians-A
When you say "They can see two color bands that humans cannot." do you mean that they can see into the infrared or ultraviolet wavelengths or do you mean that they divide up the rainbow into more than 7 colors? (I.E. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet) --Kedamono 02:10, January 9, 2010 (UTC) Sort of Both. I am stealing from a Scientific American Article, eerrrr I think it was two years ago which traced the evolution of Color vision. Early Mammals didn't need color vision, they were nocturnal, and so they lost color vision and so later mammals have had to re-invent it. Birds have better color vision than we do - they evolved down through a daylight carnivorous hunting lineage - and so never lost the color vision that evolved first. I recall an Image where human eyes had three.... thingies... while Bird eyes had five .... thingies... I'll look up the reference and post it back here. What I am imagining is that the birds can see a slightly wider window of EM radiation, but they can also see colors more sharply and with better definition. The Saurian Team A has similar visual accuity, so human attempts at camoflauge would be less effective, and human art would seem flat and lifeless, lacking colors they'd see and enjoy. Jayphailey 09:29, January 9, 2010 (UTC) The Sci Am Article Here's the link - sadly the whole article is behind a pay-to-play wall, but the preview contains enough of what I was thinking. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=evolution-of-primate-color-vision From the April 2009 Scientific American Magazine Color Vision: How Our Eyes Reflect Primate Evolution By Gerald H. Jacobs and Jeremy Nathans "...It is remarkable, then, that for most human beings any color can be reproduced by mixing together just three fixed wavelengths of light at certain intensities. This property of human vision, called trichromacy, arises because the retina the layer of nerve cells in the eye that captures light and transmits visual information to the brain uses only three types of light-absorbing pigments for color vision. One consequence of trichromacy is that computer and television displays can mix red, green and blue pixels to generate what we perceive as a full spectrum of color. Although trichromacy is common among primates, it is not universal in the animal kingdom. Almost all nonprimate mammals are dichromats, with color vision based on just two kinds of visual pigments. A few nocturnal mammals have only one pigment. Some birds, fish and reptiles have four visual pigments and can detect ultraviolet light invisible to humans..." Jayphailey 09:35, January 9, 2010 (UTC) later in the article it says that some female primates have developed quad-chromancy... or whatever the term is. The genes that control for that descend through the female line. We don't know if some Human women have Quad-chromancy. How would they know thaat what they were seeing was different from anyone else? Dale Russel's Saurians I am using Dale Russell's dinosauroids for the team A guys. You mentioned in e-mail how you disliked them so hard, so I haven't brought it up any more on the list... I am using D&D Lizard Men as the basis for Team-B Saurians. However both are horribly human-ocentric. The shoulder looks horrible once you think about it. The Theropd stance (Two Bird Legs and the Body balanced horizontally on them) would be just fine for walking, tool using hunters. Heavier arms equalized by a longer tail. the Skull might get longer to allow more brain. So I am picturing a small Deinochys or whatever with the eyes squished forward and close for binocular vision and then the top of the face pushed forward along the snout. It would take some massaging to make it look balanced and right. They wouldn't need the big biting jaws and teeth - that's what spears and knives are for. But they wouldn't need human style pelvises, spines, ribcages and shoulders. Those are all human-centric biases. Their own would work just fine. But I lack the talent to draw or render these sorts of creatures currently.